1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a machine-implemented method for data conversion, more particularly to a machine-implemented method adapted for converting a plurality of entries of component data in a bill of materials.
2. Description of the Related Art
A bill of materials generated by current Product Data Management (PDM) software, such as that available from the U.S. based company Agile, often contains text content that is difficult for personnel such as engineers to reference. For example, text content such as “optional material number” is irrelevant to engineers seeking capacitance or resistance data. Moreover, entries of component data are not presented in an order that facilitates data look-up. Furthermore, although the aforementioned software is capable of displaying a value range of a specified component data value, the value range is not always displayed in a suitable format. For example, for a capacitor having a capacitance value range of ‘0.1U±10%’, the aforementioned software converts the value range to ‘0.0900-0.1100’, while the format ‘90-110n’ is actually more useful to engineers. As such, there is a need to present the entries of the component data in a bill of materials in a manner that is more easily referenced, and that reduces the need for manual conversion of component data values.